Congress to Investigate the PlayStation Hack; DHS Also Interested in the PSN Outage

The recent PlayStation Network (PSN) outage continues to thwart officials looking for solutions to the surprise hack. Those who had their personal data stolen due to the incident might be happy to know that the U.S. government has gotten into the act, as Homeland Security is now helping Sony deal with the PSN outage.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the passwords on some or all of the 77 million accounts have been compromised. The most concerning to those with PSN accounts: Data stolen by hackers can be used to easily create false identities.

In addition to Homeland Security, the U.S. Congress is also interested in the PSN predicament, according to a recent Technologies, Gadgets & Curiosities blog. The U.S. Congress’ Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade has asked Sony 13 questions about the incident, with a May 4 scheduled hearing. A few of the questions Sony will have to answer include:

When and how did you become aware of the illegal and unauthorized intrusion?

Why did you wait to notify your customers of the breach?

Was the information obtained applicable to all accounts or a portion of the accounts? How many consumers or accounts were impacted by this breach and how did you ascertain the number?

Have you identified how the breach occurred?

Have you identified the individual(s) responsible for the breach?

What steps have you taken or do you plan to take to prevent future such breaches?

Fred H. Cate, director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University at Bloomington, advises everyone, not only those with PSN accounts, to take away a valuable lesson from this particular hack. “I would also take this as a really valuable object lesson of why you shouldn’t use the identical password across accounts,” he said in the Chronicle article.